When the sun sets on the Would-Be Farm, the local population gets a little wilder and more lively.

Mice wake up and start scampering about.

Skunks and porcupines saunter through the camp.

Coyotes slope along, sniffing at the traces of our dinner.

​Deer graze their way through, and raccoons ––well, the raccoons are kind of freaking me out.

Half asleep in our narrow berth inside Base Camp, we are roused by sound: a crunching, rattling, scratching assault on the recycling container, a lengthy effort to unsnap the cooler, a hissing dust-up over a piece of aluminum foil that once held roasted chicken.

Eventually, Mr. Linton or I will have had Just About Enough and shout at the intruders. Angry-Daddo-Voice invective, which sometimes works, but does require warning the other person. ("Hey, I'm going to yell." "All right." "GERRROUT OF IT!")

Scamper scamper scamper.

​If I can manage to get the door open and the flashlight on (assuming the game camera is NOT likely to catch the maniacal image) I sometimes burst out onto the porch and chase the raccoons.

​But they tend to hear me coming and vanish into the underbrush before I have the satisfaction of frightening them.

​As it happens, raccoons are determined creatures with pretty good memories.

They had a single night of access into the cooler last spring when someone (me) failed to fully snap the lid closure.

For the rest of the season, they proved quite willing to chew their way back in.

We ended up putting one cooler on top of another and setting out an array of hair-trigger mousetraps to dissuade them.

We kept them from destroying the cooler, but they haven't yet given up.

Raccoons will chew through a cooler.

This autumn, they discovered both suet and the bird feeders.

As Jeff put it: they ate a whole LOAF of suet.

Naturally, they knocked a bird feeder over and emptied it also.

I'm as judgmental as the next person. Probably more (said she, snortling in a juvenile way at the irony.)

I do make a moral judgement about "good birds" and "bad birds" at my bird feeder, and without the shadow of moral doubt, raccoons are no-good birds.

I decided on a new routine: every evening, I stow the feeders out of reach of raccoons (as well as beyond the stretch of bears, rats, the neighbor's cat, squirrels, et cetera).

But I didn't think about the large glass pickle-jar that holds the seed before it's dispensed to birds good or bad.

However, the raccoons did.

The first morning, I found the jar tipped over, the lid unscrewed and a small, tidy spill of seeds on the porch.

Huh, I thought. I better tighten that lid.

The next night I heard the jar tip over.

Wakeful under my cozy quilt, I gloated over the thought of the raccoon. He'd be bent over the jar, tiny ebony hand spread flat on the metal lid, a grimace and a grunt accompanying the futile effort to unscrew the lid.

​Hope he busts a gut, I thought.

Then I thought, I sure hope he doesn't bust a jar. Damnit.

In the morning, the birdseed was not on my mind. I was blithely drinking my coffee and being all China-to-Peru about the dew-laden field opposite the porch.

Mr. Linton has a somewhat alarming way of striding off vigorously early in the morning at the Farm. Coffee is nothing to him, giving him a considerable head start on the day.

As is his wont, he strode back presently, asking without preamble, "Do you know what I found halfway up the hill?!"

I turned to look, and lo, he was carrying the jar –– blessedly intact –– full of birdseed.

"They got it nearly all the way UP the hill," he reiterated, annoyance at war with disbelief.

"Heading for their lair."

We gazed at the object.

Raccoons hadn't learned yet how to break the glass. They hadn't gotten the lid off with their odd little hands or their sharp teeth.

​But who could say what resources they had back at Raccoon Headquarters?

What sharp teethesies you have.

I changed lids and put the jar inside. Thin the tin walls of Base Camp may be, and permeable as sponge, but there is a geographical limit to transgression.

You'd think, anyhow.

When the light slants just right, a distinct handprint can be seen on the window that looks into the sleeping nook at Base Camp. Maybe two inches across, the little handprint is smeared on the window that stands a good three feet off the ground.

I try not to imagine why a raccoon climbed up and appears to have pushed –– pushed!–– on the window that looks into our sleeping quarters.

​Maybe things have progressed to post-coital pillow-talk –– be it as it may, I think we need not peep too closely.

Along comes the big bad. Slithering. Licking the air with a forked tongue for the scent of mousey love. Perhaps the big bad has developed a taste for these tender morsels in their nuptial bower. Or wants to.

In a moment comes a squeaking in the humid dark. A thump perhaps, and a scrabble...A fierce little battle that no diminutive St. George can hope to win.

A final squeak and silence fills Base Camp.

The big bad curls around a full tummy and snoozes for a day or a week, and wakes to the delightfully stretchy feeling of impending shed. The nuptial bower now a spa room. Exfoliation and microderm abrasion. Buffed. Polished.

The modern game-trail camera is an enduring pleasure. Eight lithium batteries and a 16-gig card about doubles the price for one of these sturdy little gizmos, but it's still an bargain peep into the wildlife show at the Farm.

Each season brings its surprises past the motion detector. Sometimes a bear. Sometimes a bird –– or squirrel! –– mid-flight. We nearly always have coyotes and deer.

But the surprise this summer was the repeated photo of a free-range Highland Cow (knows in Scotland as the Heeland Coo).

We were rooting for her: she the last of her herd, escaped from the roundup when the neighbor sold off all of his cows in the spring. We heard how she'd jumped the fence and headed for the hills.

When wrangled into an old barn, she leaped through a glass window for freedom. Burst out and was gone with what I imagine was a sassy flick of her blonde tail.

​There, we thought, is a cow who knows which side of the fence is which. Cue the music from Born Free.

She looks so at home, as wary as a deer in the woods.

I didn't want to ask the follow-up question in September.

Let's all pretend that she's running free still.

Let's pretend that instead of thinking about whether she irritated the guy with the gun, or how she got packaged by the pound. Or any of her last moments.

Thanks Matt Munro, for the words Andy Williams sings on the dopey movie that gave me an unreasonable penchant for dented old Land Rovers: "Stay free where no walls divide you/You're free as the roaring tide/So there's no need to hide. Born free."

​One ranger-led evening program included an entertaining slide show where the audience was invited to guess: Mars? Or Utah? It was harder than you might expect.

Second big thing about Utah? Mormonism.

What we don't know about the religion would fill a library. (Just for the record: our ignorance extends to nearly all branches of belief. We are non-denominational like that.)

But thanks to the Big Parks Trip, we do know why there are orchards at Capitol Reef National Park, and why the fort at Pipe Springs was built.

Here's my abbreviated version of the history: Back in the day (mid 1800's), when Mormons were facing persecution in the eastern US, Brigham Young led his followers into the Utah Territory, where they could practice their religion without oversight or interference from the government. Since, naturally, the territory was not yet a state.

Long story short, the conflict between faith and state came to actual war between Young's followers (the Nauvoo Legion) and the US Army.

It's no surprise then, that Young would encourage his people in self-sufficiency and plan for what felt like an inevitable return to open hostilities with the government.

Mormons went into the desert to start farming. Taking advantage of the water in the Waterpocket Fold (that's what the cognoscenti call that 100-mile long wrinkle in the Earth's crust), farmers planted apples, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, peaches, almonds, and more.

These orchards are part of the "historic landscape" that visitors to the Fruita Campgrounds in Capitol Reef can still enjoy today.

As in, one can wander around in the orchard and eat apricots to one's heart's content.

3000 or so fruit trees are maintained by the National Parks Service (the last settlers moved out in the 1960's after selling their land to the Park). An earthly paradise.

And likewise, the Mormon ranch at Pipe Springs is a National Monument. Halfway between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, Pipe Springs served as a stop-over for early tourists out west.

My historical summary: For time immemorial, local Kaibab Paiute people came here on their annual circuit. At the end of winter, this little oasis was full of rice grass and small game. And for time immemorial, the Paiutes moved along for better hunting and gathering as the seasons changed.

Then the Europeans showed up.

To be fair, according to the story we heard, Mormons settlers arrived in November.

They didn't know someone was already calling the Springs home.

They didn't understand that the rich grazing they found for their cattle might not last forever.

They didn't realize the life-or-death impact their cows' overgrazing would have on the Kaibab Paiutes.

​Luckily for the Mormons, these particular natives were not a warlike lot. Between small-pox, TB, and starvation, the local population of natives dwindled pretty rapidly.

By 1905, there may have been something like 90 tribe members left.

So why the fort? And why the telegraph line?

It was, so we heard in our tour, part of Brigham Young's strategic line of retreat in case the US government took up against the Mormons again.

Young would head south to Mexico if things went –– you know –– South for him.

The fortified ranch house ("Windsor Castle" was also a handy spot to hide plural wives when the federal marshals came looking for proof of polygamy.

Drought and ongoing federal prosecution of polygamy (check out the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 for some stimulating thought on church vs. state) put an end to Mormon ownership of the ranch.

It became a National Monument partly because Pipe Springs offered a way-station between the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, Today, the water rights are split between the Kaibab Paiute Tribe, the National Parks Service, and a group of descendants of the cattle farmers.

​The Kaibab Paiute (now numbering 200 souls) would still like to have the spring back, by the way.

​Ironically, of course, when the states came into being, Pipe Springs ended up in Arizona rather than Utah. Which is another thing we learned about Utah.

Pariediolia is the name for the native human tendency to construct faces out of random patterns. Like Arcimaboldo's work, but by chance rather than art.

The word comes from the Greek for something like "wrong image." Spotting the face of St. Lucia on your flatbread pizza –– mental illness notwithstanding –– is bonus in our evolutionary heritage of pattern recognition.

It's related to the way that when confronted with a paper plate decorated with bull's eyes, a wee bitty baby serves up the same charming goo-goo eyes for the plate as he gives to actual human faces. Survival of the most charming.

Which tells me that the point of imagination is to actually and genuinely save your life.​But what's it called when you spot horses everywhere?

The local osprey population LOVE using scraps of black polyethylene from construction sites for their own building projects. Naturally, it gets away from them. They don't use nearly enough fasteners. We end up picking a bale of this stuff off the lawn –– and out of the trees –– every January.

Not even the hint of buds on the trees, lakes still frozen, plenty of snow still on the ground, and a solid weekend of ice-storm.

The shape of the land shows like the ribs of a hungry animal this early in the spring.​Waiting for the arrival of spring, Mr. Linton and I blazed a couple of new trails. It's easier to make a way without having to part that modesty-drape of leaves and grass.

Naming the trails is surprisingly difficult, for what we end up calling them.

At the risk of self-conscious whimsy, there's The Road that goes all the way to the beaver pond, past Porcupine Falls and Long Meadow.

New Trail leads out the northern end of New Pasture past Hickory Corners to Blueberry Hill.

Loop Trail links New Trail to the Road. Thag creates fire!

Gah. I feel as if I missed some important lesson about place names.

All those jokes about housing developments named for the thing it displaces (Osprey Reach, Dolphin Cove, yadda yadda). Ironic.

Anyway, a few days and a few yellow blazes later, we now we have Dead Possum Trail (named for the skeleton we found, natch) and what I first thought would be Trillium Trail.

Then we noticed this:

So, Broken Wagon Trail it is.

Okay, yes, it's not technically a wagon. Neither is it precisely broken. But Abandoned Hay Rake Trail doesn't have the same ring, does it? Plus Mr. Linton named it, and what he says, goes. Sometimes. This time.

Back to the narrative.

​Late spring this year: even the old oaks seemed to be having a hard time waking up.

Given that I am often looking to eat the plants at which I am looking, plant identification is more than just an amusement.

There's a certain urgency in figuring out if it's wild carrot (puny, but tasty) or hemlock (deadly).

At the farm, I spend chunks of daylight bent over my reference books, or –– in deference to the small, specific spot of cell coverage –– sitting on a rock in the middle of the field bent over the iPad.

For the first time I can remember –– would that be a telling detail? –– I am having vocabulary troubles.

Plant identification, like most biology, starts with the correct terminology to describe any plant's growth habits. Is it a dicot or monocot? How do the veins grow in the leaves? How do leaves grow on the stem, what do the leaves look like?

Bracts. Pinneately compound whorled. Lobed petolate. Oval sessate...The words seem slippery, and I keep having to flip back to the definitions again and again.

During the all-too-brief week we spent on the Would-Be Farm in early July, I decided to postpone the research by getting clear (clear-ish) photos of the latest crop of mystery plants. This is not rocket science, but I am only just skidding into the new century of digital memory.

When I was a googly-eyed junior in high school, being all moony and swoony over my equally googly-eyed boyfriend, our biology teacher, Mr. V. would shake his head at the sight of us two and mutter under his breath, "Two smarts equal dummy."

​Oh, Mr. V., even just the one sometimes equals dummy!

Here's a few of the unknowns:

I figured I'd have tons to time to do the research during my months away from the farm. After all, some of these plants are bound to be edible. So far, not so much research, but the winter is still young...

Okay, it's a handful of shiitake, enough for Mr. Linton and me to both enjoy one mushroom uncooked, and then plenty for a pan full of butter-sautéd beauties to go into his ommette and on top of his leftover pizza.

​In a word, they were amazing. So much flavor in a tender bite of fungus!

For all I know, mushrooms have been popping up all summer, but we happened to be on hand in time to beat the squirrels and the slugs to harvest this autumn.

Slugs like shiitake. So do squirrels.

He contemplates the shiitake.

A small harvest, perhaps, but a genuine farming success uncomplicated by late frost, drought, tent caterpillars, etc., etc.